No pictures…sad…

To any and all who are upset or concerned about the lack of new pics, we are having troubles getting our Bologna internet cafe compies to upload the little suckers.  Rest assured that we will get new ones up next week sometime.  If you really care and you have a facebook account, you can see a few new ones there.  K?  K!

 

Going slowly crazy in Italy

For some reason, when I first agreed to go with Danielle on a European organic farming adventure, I imagined we would spend most of our time dressed all in white crushing grapes with our feet in a giant wooden barrel. It would always be sunset and the leaves of the grapes would be the color of the green Crayola crayon, and there might be an old guy with some sort of indigenous type instrument (like an accordion or something!) sitting on an overturned wine crate nearby. The air would smell like lemons and chocolate cake and spaghetti sauce.

As you may have guessed, it is not really like that. The farm we are working really long hours (yesterday was around 13 I think) and the work is for the most part uninteresting (yesterday I tied lavender together for about five hours). Add to this the unsunny disposition of our host mom… long story short, I am looking forward to leaving on the 14th.

As Danielle pointed out in her last post, with Woofing, you get what you pay for. The woofing hosts might get a wobbly handicap accessible walkway, and the woofer might get a farm that has 10-14 hour days and hosts that at times of stress or fatigue, speak as if they were officers at boot camp. When we first arrived at the farm, the pace of work was frantic. I feel like when you are working in a place like this, being tired is dangerous. Our fellow woofer smashed her thumb with a hammer while making that walkway and while we were patching her up, she fell dead asleep. I feel like the hosts at this farm ask a lot of their woofers, probably too much, in fact. (The fellow woofer who just left a few days ago spent 3 weeks here and did not have even one day off.) To punish them I attempt every day to eat them out of house and home everyday. This is the only way I can really hurt them, besides secretly watering the weeds in the garden or telling the bunnies they can come to Spain with me. Or complaining about them on the internet.

During those first few five-alarm knock-down drag-out hair-pulling bone-crushing hair-pulling wow-these-hay-bales-have-lead-in-the-middle days, I was pegged as The Weenie. So now I am the “inside” wwoofer. I am apparently in training to be an Italian housewife: I am being taught how to make pasta, clean the house, do laundry, and groom a steadily intensifying temper.

I continue to give pep talks to the bunnies every day. The seven that are left look at me with their tiny little expectant eyes every day when I push weeds into their little cubbies. I tell them to cheer up and eat, and to look away while I take their dead friends away to bury them in the impossibly hard dirt next to the goats.

I do miss Greece some times. I remember random things throughout the days here like how Katerina used to talk to the dogs in Greek but the cats in German.

In other news, we have gone apeshit. There is no village near by and the only contact we have with anyone outside the farm is an occasional wave or nod from a friendly bike rider passing by. We have advanced so far in the Connect the Actors game that nothing is a challenge anymore. Even doozie combinations like Pauly Shore and Jeremey Irons take less than 2 minutes. If anyone knows of any type of international Connect the Actors championships or something, please let us know! Our new game is just making five-pointed lists, endlessly, back and forth. The best cancelled TV shows. People you admire. Things to do before you die. Things you hate about lavender. When this game is exhausted (probably tomorrow), we will just start punching each in the face other for entertainment.

We also spend a fare amount of time concocting elaborate fantasies in which some nice people in a spacious but stylish Italian car stop at the side of the road and interrupt our work with a “Bonjurno! Are you tired of weeding? Would you like to go to Bolonga with us? Also, we have Diet Coke with lemon wedges here in our heavily air conditioned car!” Every car that passes has the potential to hold THESE PEOPLE, so I watch the highway constantly. I fear my vigilance has affected the quality of my weeding.

My favorite part of the day is the hour in the evening right before dinner I spend watering the mammoth garden. It takes forever and Danielle is usually busy walking the hormonal dog or watering the animals, so its just me and my Ipod in the garden for a long time. When I start with the artichokes and the lettuce, its still hot, but by the time I get to the tomatoes, the sun is behind the house and the valley is suddenly lit with oranges and yellows and purples, and its sometimes so pretty I stop dancing around in the mud to stare. It is one of the few moments of the day when I remember I am actually in magical, intoxicating, disorientingly beautiful Italy. It reminds me of what I imagined this trip to be like and it’s awesome.

 

New tasks, gorgeous Italians, nympho dogs

We have settled in at our Italy farm, and things have become a bit more reasonable, workload-wise, since the last post. And by “a bit more reasonable,” I clearly mean “better, but then again Nike Singapore kindergartener sweatshop labor would have beat the first few days.” Our hosts are, as I mildly put it, “driven.” Or as Molly more aptly puts it, “frantic.” Any job worth doing, it seems, is worth doing at top speed and on meth.

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Anyhow. The days are still 11 to 12 hours long, give or take, but that (of course) beats 14 hours any day…as well as 5:30 a.m. (or earlier) mornings. Jeez Louise. We have found ourselves doing lots of “Greece vs. Italy” comparisons, and though I do miss a few things about Greece, I can confidently say that I at least like the Italy work much more than the work we did in Greece, for the simple reason that our work here tends to be far more gratifying. Greek work tended to involve three steps:

1. Perform task (putting up horse fences, cleaning fishing nets, etc.)

2. Find out that task was futile (horses have escaped, nets most likely couldn’t even catch a drunk AND suicidal fish)

3. Slap forehead, sigh, realize that you will have to do the task daily anyway for the rest of your WWOOFing tenure.

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Whereas here, even 4 a.m. lavender-cutting yields, two days later, a giant jug of lavender oil. Granted, we are not sure what exactly this oil does (Molly tried smearing some on her bug bites; Danielle fed it to the goats and got them all messed up), but hell. The work was productive. Score one for us!!!

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We do miss being within walking distance of a village, as in Greece. Our current location is right along a major local highway, which gives us lots of vehicle lust…not in the sense of “Ooh! Pretty BMW!” but more in the sense of “You see those people? They’re GOING somewhere! Probably somewhere with Diet Coke, movie theaters, and other people! OTHER PEOPLE!” Living on the highway has also given us some insight into what Italians drive…namely,

1. cute, compact little station-wagon-y things

2. big, loud (both in noise and decoration), ugly motorbikes of the type that we in the states call “crotch rockets”

3. bicycles

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It’s kind of fun to see all the cyclists that go by all day…and this isn’t granny and grandpa out for a spin on their Huffies. This is the full-on 40 mph set, awash in brightly colored spandex and chugging all gung-ho up the hills (and oh, do we have hills). And it is simply amazing on Sundays. For you Iowa folk, it’s a lot like a miniature, spread-out RAGBRAI all day, every day.

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Anyhow, back to the farm – we have some regular tasks, such as feeding the goats, sheep, ponies, chickens, dogs, and (still steadily dropping) bunnies; as well as watering the garden, which is also an important and time-consuming task here, as it was in Greece. This week has added three major items to the WWOOFer plate: the wheelchair walkway, weed-whacking-slash-mowing and dog chaperoning.

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There is a pile of scrap wood behind the hay bales. It is large and consists of boards of varying widths, thicknesses, lengths, and degrees of rottenness. And we all remember that old saying: “When life hands you rotten boards and a WWOOFer with no construction experience…make a handicap-accessible walkway!” So Allie* and I set to work on constructing a walkway that starts by the animal cages, travels past the flower beds, and ends its glorious, scenic journey right in the middle of a large patch of……..dirt.

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Hey. We just follow instructions.

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One of my personal mottos for this trip, however, is “WWOOFers: you get what you pay for.” Just as I consider not nailing my hand to the walkway an accomplishment, I wouldn’t expect Bob Vila to crank out a particularly coherent essay on Pre-Raphaelite literature, especially on a volunteer basis. So I’m not feeling too bad about any crooked or death-inducing boards. Meh. I tried. (Seriously, though: to any future physically disabled guests of Ca’ del Buco: I am so sorry.)

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The weed-whacking-slash-mowing is really exactly how it sounds….namely, they had me mow half of a really quite spacious lawn in the last two days WITH NOTHING BUT AN EIGHT-GAZILLION-POUND WEED-WHACKER. This at least gave me a wonderful photo op with my scary apron-and-face-mask get-up, but also led to a “SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP!” moment when I discovered a LAWNMOWER in the shed. Whaaaaa…? <slaps forehead>

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As for the dog chaperoning – as a backstory, we have four dogs: Tex, a smallish yappy mutt who is quite simply Earth’s stupidest living entity; and three larger dogs: Sinbad, Coach, and Mila. Anyhow, we’re sitting at breakfast with Paola**, when suddenly she jumps up and runs to Mila’s little house, screaming, “No, no, no, NO, NO, NONONONONO!” She then yells for me to get a pitcher of cold water, and I oblige, shooting confused looks at Molly as I walk towards Mila’s abode, where Sinbad is…

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Oh.

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As Molly put it after I <cough> defused the situation, “Poor Sinbad! He’s just so full of emotion! It’s OK, buddy!”

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Long story short, we are the teachers at the middle school dance to the dogs’ hormone-crazed seventh-graders. And because we have reached our “apeshit” point (and also because we are immature and AWESOME), this has given us endless material as we sit, cold-water jugs at the ready:

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“Listen, Sinbad. I know it was great, it was fun, but you gotta call her. You can’t just do something like that and not call. I mean, are you a man, or are you a mouse? Huh? I bet she even let you have some of her breakfast this morning, am I right? Ugh. You all are just the same, aren’t you?”

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Of course, the situation is further complicated by the fact that Coach is Sinbad’s mother and Mila is Coach’s sister. Sinbad is having some conflict, needless to say:

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<in what we imagine to be Sinbad’s inner monologue voice> “I just don’t know what to do! I have these strange new FEELINGS, I’m having these DREAMS at night, I’m getting hair all over, and I just can’t help but think that my aunt is HOT! Come to think of it, Mom is lookin’ kind of smokin’ lately, too…”

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On a completely different but nevertheless remarkable note, we have named this particular trip the “some stereotypes are true tour.” Greek men are forward; Italians do indeed say “EAT! EAT!” to you every few minutes at every meal, no matter how far unbuttoned you already have your pants; armpit-shaving doesn’t seem to be that important to European women (not that there’s anything wrong with that…); Italians all ALWAYS look really, really good and just classily-put-together (making me feel perma-frumpy, but that’s beside the point); and so on. What shocked me, however, was to sit in a café the other day and suddenly hear the haunting strains of a familiar and, given the circumstances, perhaps offensive melody…yes, the Godfather theme, set as a cell phone ringtone. I thought, “Oh, man. Some clueless American tourist is about to get his ass BEATEN!” But lo and behold, it was an Italian man. This goes right up there in the “Really? You’re OK with that?” column, alongside Greeks wearing 300 t-shirts. Who knew?

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Of course, this all may sound way Debbie Downer – heavy and unnecessary workload, nympho dogs, etc. – and we are indeed superpumped to check out other parts of Italy and Spain. But (and I am certain this will sound very Taster’s Choice) it is lots of fun to do this trip with Molly. We have found that we divide the work well – I take the heavy outdoor tasks that require no thought and no subtlety of movement or decision-making (weed-whacking, rabbit burial), and Molly takes the tasks that actually require motor skills and complexity (the mind-numbing little lavender-stem sachets, spitting in the freshly made jam when Paola isn’t looking). Plus, I can imagine no one else with whom I would rather play 8-hour sessions of “connect the celebrities” and “top five _______.” On July 4^th, in a truly patriotic mood, we did the top five things we do not miss about the US. Pondering the failing economy, the number of times one hears the word “quagmire” on the evening news, the decidedly lesser quantity of prosciutto in comparison to Italy, a flooded Midwest, and the fact that Hillary’s run is over…it all made this trip to foreign lands seem just all-around BETTER, something I hadn’t thought possible.

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In addition, I have had several disoriented middle-of-the-night panic moments in which I wake up and think, ”Holy crap! I haven’t checked in at work in…like…a MONTH! My ass is getting fired! Why am I in EUROPE? I must surely have responsibilities to someone!” Then I think about it. Nope. I am home free. I can come home whenever I want. Or whenever funds run out.

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In other words, bee-stings and lavender-bundling aside, life is sweet.

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Well, that’s about it. I leave it to Molly to fill in the gaps and make more inappropriate Sinbad jokes.

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*Allie left on Friday, and we are sad. But way to go for us, getting two quality co-WWOOFers in a row. Allie! Come back! Translate their Italian for us!

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** Paola is a woman who, just to give you a picture of her particular personality, JAMS OUR BREAD FOR US. Not in a “here, let me help you with that” sort of way, but rather in a “Jesus, let me do it since you clearly will not do it quickly or efficiently” sort of way. I’m just saying, is all…

 

Conigli morti

We have arrived in Italy, and the trip was magnificent…

• First, Ioannina, Greece. A beautiful little city on a lake, where we saw our first precipitation on the whole trip and stayed in a beautiful hotel room. And where we each did indeed take obscenely long showers and watch some TV. Though one of the only English offerings on said TV was ”How to lose a guy in 10 days.” –slams head against wall– Maybe the big hippie-WWOOFer gods are punishing us for wanting a little TV. I dunno. Anyhow, we went from Ioannina to…
• Igoumenitsa, where we discovered the joys of ferries. This is officially my new favorite way to travel, and I believe Molly would agree with me. Our Eurail passes got us deck passage aboard a ferry bound for Italy. What is cool about deck passage is that you take your sleeping bag and pack, stake out some property, and camp out somewhere on deck (or, as some intelligent passengers did, on a couch in the corner of the bar/casino). And yes, there is a bar/casino, as well as a hot tub, a (laughably small) swimming pool, several restaurants, showers, and BRITISH TOURISTS! YES! THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE! THE SWEET MUSIC OF THE GODS! But we had to bid farewell upon arrival in…
• Ancona. As Lonely Planet puts it, ”Ancona’s biggest tourest draw is leaving Ancona.” Enough said.
• Then we took the train to Bologna (the simply GORGEOUS city where I am as I type this), where we hopped on a bus to…
• OUR FARM. Our farm is an agriturismo, which is like a B & B where the guests get to see farm life and help out if they want. The place is run by a couple, Paola and Roberto, who have a son who is not here for the entire time we are…and, though children are a blessing and all lovely and innocent, blah blah, I believe I speak for both of us when I say that we are welcoming the reprieve.

Anyhow. Roberto reminds me a lot of Iowa farmers. He’s very nice, works really hard, helps with the cooking, and is encouraging and totally forgiving if we make any mistakes (snapping a string on a hay bale, etc.).

Paola, on the other hand, is a hard-ass, to put it lightly. We’ll keep it at that.

Speaking of hard-assness, they run a tighter ship here than in Greece…a ship where, apparently, there is a stash of speed somewhere on-board, because we still haven’t figured out how Roberto and Paola maintain their energy for the work they do. Roberto is a sanitation worker for the city of Bologna, and Paola is a judo teacher. IN ADDITION to the farming, which is, as I said, hard-assed. For example, our first day consisted of waking up at 5:30 a.m., loading and unloading hay bales with Roberto, bundling lavender (dear God, the effing lavender), cutting lavender (unnnnnnngh) (also, bee stings galore), and then much more hay, and then lavender-cutting (I hate lavender so much at this point that, if I ever set foot in a Bath and Body Works store again, I just might snap). At around 9 p.m., I ran up to the house to nurse a bee sting, and Roberto made me sit down with him and eat supper, as Paola was insisting on cutting lavender until dark. ”But, Roberto, Molly and Allie (co-WWOOFer) are still working…” ”I will go get them. Paola is crazy. You eat.”

So since we didn’t finish the lavender, we got up the next morning at FOUR A.M. YES, FOUR A.M. I gathered a bundle of lavender and promptly got stung.

”Impossible!” said Paola dismissively. ”The bees aren’t out yet!”

As if on cue, a truly monstrous bee flew out and landed on the back of her shirt, and she begged us to brush it off.

Heh heh heh. Suckah.

Anyway. The food, once again, is OUTSTANDING…even better than Greece, though prosciutto and other meats factor heavily into the meals. Which is fine (and by ”fine” I clearly mean ”heavenly”) with me, but inconsequential to Ms. Molly Vegetarian Angstman.

The only other real news from the farm is the rabbit plague, due to which we have learned a new Italian phrase — ”conigli morti,” or ”dead rabbits.” Every day, for unknown reasons, three rabbits have died, and we are down to about 15 rabbits now. This is sad (and gross, as we have to carry the stiff, dead corpses to our rapidly growing rabbit cemetery), but it did mean that yesterday Allie and I had the laughable task of catching the remaining little suckers from the large pen and putting them in separate cages so they could be sort of primitively quarantined. According to Molly, we looked hilarious, all hunched over and concentrating fiercely. But concentration is necessary, as even the chubby rabbits are surprisingly quick and good at putting up a fight. Futhermore — to my horror — rabbits can SCREAM. Seriously. Grab one when it doesn’t want to be grabbed, and it just HOWLS, which scared the living bejeezus out of me the first time it happened. However, rabbits being infinitely stupid, you can make them calm down by holding down their ears, which is one of the stupider evolutionary tricks ever…right up there with fainting goats. God gave rabbits a giant, obvious off-switch right on top of their heads. Genius.

Well, our bodacious, farmers-tanned deltoids are sore from all of that hay-baling (but not the lavender…let us never speak of lavender again) (ever) and we should go nurse them. By burying our faces in a trough of tortelloni. –dies of happiness–

 

Greek Farm, Day 20

I picked one random day and decided to document what happened on the farm so you can all see what life is like as a wwoofer 

Greek Farm, Day 20

6:45  -  Get up, get ready, eat half box of Cheerios
7:30  -  Start weeding garden
7:45  -  Katerina comes to garden screaming
8:00  -  Begin 1st session of the day of the Connect the Actors Game (game has grown increasingly intense as we are running out of combinations)
8:30  -  Weed different part of garden, rejoice in exotic change of location
9:30  -  Go collect old horse fence with Danielle 
10:00  -  Break to go gossip with Hallie
10:15  -  Start cleaning fishing nets, start 1st session of the day of the Spanish Game (which is not really a game, its just trying to chat in Spanish for practice for our Spain farm, where not a whole lot of English is spoken)
10:20  -  Spend 10 minutes trying to remember the Spanish word for “kitchen” 
10:40  -  Quit Spanish Game.  It is too hard.
12:50  -  Break to go gossip with Hallie
1:00  -  Help make lunch/set table
1:20  -  Everyone gathers at table for lunch  (lunch is stuffed peppers and three salads and fresh bread and cheese from the goats next door)
1:21  -  Katerina screaming
1:22  -  Sophia screaming
1:35  -  Dishes
1:38  -  Sophia taunting dog with kittens
1:40  -  Katerina taunting dog with kittens
1:45  -  Wash table
1:46  -  Katerina arrives in kitchen mostly naked and covered in poop (see previous post)
1:47  -  Anika takes Katerina out back to be hosed down
1:55  -  Drying dishes
1:58  -  Sophia attempts to capture Katerina in laundry basket
2:02  -  Sophia goes back to torturing kittens
2:03  -  Dishes done
2:04  -  Take out compost bucket
2:05  -  Siesta time!  Dream of weeding.
5:30  -  Back to work in the garden
7:30  -  Feed horses  (its easy to carry massive hay bales is easy because of our massive pipes)
8:00  -  Done with work, hang out with Hallie and Margaret in Argalasti
11:00  -  Sleep, dream of weeding

 

Cat poop.

We are currently in Volos, killing time until a bus can take us to Ioannina, from which we will go to Igoumenitsa and hop on a 15-hour ferry to Italy.  15 hours of overnight ferrying and I’m STILL excited!  Eeeeee!

Anyhow, lots of business to take care of today, so a quick rundown of final-Greece-stuff:

1) First a shout-out to the Greek people.  Yes, we complain about the fact that the culture here has yet to hear about things like, oh, I don’t know, respectful treatment of women, the impoliteness of staring, etc.  BUT.  The Greeks have been very VERY hospitable, especially to us foreigners.  They try really hard to speak English with us (and usually do it pretty well) and, failing that, to understand us when we are trying to jabber in garbled Greek.  And, even including the strange (Tourette’s-stricken?) woman at the village bakery who just liked to yell at us, they are all quite friendly and not-frustrated while doing it.  Great job, Greece!

2)  I now appreciate showers like I never had before.  I plan on taking one that is an hour long at our motel in Ioannina.  I just may eat and take naps, coffee breaks, etc. during it.

3) The other day (about which I’m pretty sure Molly is also blogging) was pretty much a landmark day in terms of the children.  Even without Yanni (the knife-sharpening minion of Hell), the girls reached new heights of disorder and dysfunctionality.  It was a morning of howling and wailing, complete with Katerina running around completely nudy and crying.  The nudiness just makes it all more pathetic and makes you want to comfort her more — sure, it’s 100 degrees out, but this poor child is sad AND unclothed! — and yet you have no idea how, because who wants to pick up the nudy crying child with lots of snot on her face? Also, it made me want to just shake Sofia, because somehow it seems even meaner to hit your sister when she’s naked.

Anyhow.  Sofia and Katerina spent much of the morning hitting each other, and then much of what would have been a wonderful lunchtime (scrambled eggs, MASHED POTATOES, salad, copious amounts of ketchup*) being homicidal alternately toward each other and — you guessed it — the kittens.  While Hallie, Anika, Molly and I were washing dishes and admirably ignoring the Iwo-Jima-intensity fighting outside, in comes Katerina in the following state:

a) bawling her eyes out

b) wearing undies incorrectly, in a way that can only be described as “sideways,” with the crotch on her hip and…yeah.  It would have been comical, except for…

c) POOP ON HER STOMACH.

And she then screams, “MAMA!  CACA!  MAMA!  CACA!”

Molly looked horrified, nearly dropped her dish, and skittered backwards.  I, stunned, stared in horror as my brain said, “Ok, kid.  At least tell me that’s not YOUR poop.”  And then, “Wait.  Tell me it’s not your sister’s, either.”

As it turns out, she squeezed a kitten a little too hard and it defecated all over her.  Anika took her outside to hose her off (I am not making any of this up).  We all died a little from an intense mixture of horror and comedy.  Which was intensified when the new WWOOFer, Margaret, showed up yesterday.  Before she had yet met the children, I told her this story and we had the following exchange:

HER: Wait.  How OLD is Katerina?

ME: <deadpan> Fifteen.

HER: <horrified silence>

Anyhow.  The children were actually mostly good this past week, despite this incident, and they colored with us a lot.  It is very possible that I enjoyed it even more than they did.  Coloring is even more fun than I remember it being.  Perhaps my brain has turned to mush.

4) We learned last night from Margaret that Nikos has MADE A CD OF HIM PLAYING THE BOUZOUKI AND SINGING.  Nikos plays the bouzouki all day, all night, rain, shine, and of course even if we are sleeping, and especially even if Anika tells him to stop, and especially especially if there is pressing work to do.  Anyhow, we were sad, because this is a GOLD MINE of information, and we only found out last night.  <sigh>  Ah, well.

Well, that’s it for now.  We head to Italy soon!  SO EXCITED!

Thanks for commenting, friends and family et al.  I am happy that all this writing and story-recounting is not all for naught.

Danielle

*Regarding ketchup: a shout-out to Margaret for reenacting the Prairie Home Companion ketchup commercials with me last night.  Made my week and made me miss the Midwest.  Also gave me an opportunity to whip out my “Midwestern middle-aged woman voice.”

 

Molly’s 2 euro cents

Hello all,

Danielle has covered everything very well!! Quite an exciting couple of days on the farm this week…the two most common words used have been “Kaput” and “Catastrophe”. I have become The Girl Who Gets Zapped By The Electric Fence and also Tan Girl, both titles I never expected to have in life. I am very much enjoying our days off in Volos when I spent shocking amounts of money on candy and Diet Coke, both of which are just soooo goooooood in Europe!

Today we went to the Archeology Museum in Volos which has a collection of hair clippies from 10th Century BC!!!

We are very excited about Italy and not having to build horses fences in Italy. Since there are no horses on the Italy farm, we ask ourselves, “what work could there possibly be to do?!”

 

Unfriendly Neighbors

It has been an eventful past-few-days at the farm.

First things first: the generator broke. Which is bad. Allow me to clarify — in an earlier post I had said it was solar-powered, which is wrong. Our situation is that the (diesel-powered) generator, which we run for about 3 hours a day, allows anything plugged-in to work, and (more importantly) pumps up water so we can shower and wash dishes (our drinking water we get from a spring nearby, which is kind of cool). The solar panel just heats shower-water and gives us electric lights.

So the generator broke, and apparently it is a month-old beast of a machine that was bought at great cost in Athens (a 5-hour drive away, plus two more hours for the monumental Athens traffic) specifically to be “reliable” and thus avoid situations such as this.

Anyhow. It was discovered that it was broken just before lunch the other day. Anika pointed out that this meant no garden-watering (and hence the ruin of LOTS of produce), no showers, and potentially spending lots of money. Then she started crying. Sofia was mute. The WWOOFers looked at each other and wondered (a) do we comfort her? (b) if so, how? (c) how long will they keep us around? (d) how long can we stand each others’ smell? Nikos fumed silently. Caterina, oblivious, continued with her lunchtime kitten-maiming. Demon-child Yanni inexplicably pulled out his pocketknife and started sharpening it. And the sheer discomfort of the situation, combined with Yanni’s weaponry, caused me to start giggling, which is HORRIBLE, but I was just so uncomfortable I didn’t know what to do. Reflex. Ugh.

Anyhow, that night, Nikos stayed up late to fiddle with the old generator, and we sat and watched him, beers in hand, offering occasional encouragement (“Looks good, Nikos.” “Yup.”). And all is well that ends well, because late the next day, Nikos got the old one to WORK! SHOWERS! GARDEN-WATERING! There was much rejoicing, and Nikos became instantly cool. Or at least passable.

Allow me also to interject here about the enormity of the garden-watering task on our farm. I remember when I was little, asking Mom (in fact, BEGGING) to let me water the garden. This was a task that was very easy to screw up, in the sense that, in my 5-year-old zeal, I would water it for hours on end and drown everything. No such risk here. It requires over an hour of water, twice a day, from a very fat hose. As we learned this last week, a day and a half without watering = massive death among the cucumbers and zucchinis. Once again, this garden is truly kind of amazing. So much food in it. And apparently, someone has been sneaking in at night and stealing artichokes and cucumbers — at last count, around 15 artichokes have gone missing, and 3 cucumbers. And they are neatly cut — it’s not a badger/fox/lizard/whatever that’s doing it. Hence we blame some unruly neighbor.

On that note, in a roundabout way, the other big recent event was that the horses got out. Actually, they got out 3 times. In three days. This is upsetting on so many levels:

1) Building horse fences is time-consuming.

2) Dealing w/ them involves the risk of electric shock.

3) There are 44 horses.

4) It has been HOT.

5) We put in roughly 2-3 hours of work on one fence, only for the horses to get out, in some cases, 8 hours later.

So there has been a lot of running around, wringing of hands, wailing, moaning, and general gnashing of teeth at these impossible animals. Even (especially, rather) on Anika and Nikos’ part. These horses are some sort of protected species here in Greece, so the fam gets a stipend to raise them until the end of 2009. At which point, as Anika put it, “You want a horse to bring back to America? If not, we go to butcher!”

But it hasn’t been poor-fence-building or incompetent WWOOFers as the culprit; at least, not every time. As it turns out, the fence has been disconnected from the power source on a couple of occasions — something horses probably can’t do. Even protected species. And Anika and Nikos have had some recent disagreements over grazing land w/ a particularly nastly old coot of a neighbor, so he is our current suspect #1. Grrrrrrrrr……….

Anyhow, as we want to be sure that the horses “respect” the electricity at any cost (just in case they do get out of their own volition sometimes), we had a fun activity last night in which we penned them all up by the stable, then took a long piece of the electrified fence-tape and ran around and zapped the horses. It was cathartic. PETA would hate us. It also hopefully did some good. And just in case you think us cruel, keep in mind that Molly and I arguably got shocked more often than the horses.

Anyhow, it is another beautiful day (day OFF!) in Volos. We have discovered a truly life-changing candy store, amazing pizza, etc. And on a personal, shallow note, today I decided that I finally have enough hair to warrant purchasing a brush. Clearly, life is good.

Leaving for Italy in five days! This (I mean it this time) is probably the last post until then. Assuming we learn how to read the bus schedule, we should get there safely and soundly on Saturday evening.

 

A few quick words on Greek health care…

About a week ago, I was hit by the sore throat from Hell. Not a cold, not a flu, just an inability to swallow without wanting to punch a wall and cry.

And so, after a lot of hesitation, I went to the Argalasti Medical Center. Why hesitation, you ask? Because my low-income (Ok, no income at the moment) American brain went, “EEEEEE! Too expensive! Do not spend $1000 at the doctor for a freaking sore throat, you weenie!”

But when it was all too much and meals were becoming a chore (and it is a firm principle in my brain that eating should never, NEVER be anything but awesome), I said “uncle” and meekly croaked to Anika, “How much does a doctor cost around here?”

Baffled, she answered, “It is free!”

Of course! Because they are SANE here!

So I went to the doctor for free. And this medical center — in a town of 2600, I might add — is open 24 HOURS A DAY and, according to Anika, “can do everything except for babies” (Delivering them, that is).

Pardon me for a huge foreigner moment (and also a huge liberal moment) but THAT IS SO FREAKING COOL! THAT IS SO COOL! Now, granted, the doctor looked at my throat and examined me and determined, “Nothing is wrong!”, in response to which I yowled in pain…but upon going back a second time (because it is FREE HEALTH CARE! FREE! HEALTH! CARE!), the other doctor determined that what she meant was, “You have a virus. You are screwed. Sorry, lady. Bed rest and juice.” Well, I like bed rest and juice. Plus, I have an even bigger excuse to eat lots and lots of my newest major diet staple — honey. Like, made-by-the-neighbors’-bees honey. DEEEEELICIOUS. I will try to smuggle some home. Booyah!

Furthermore, the lovely doctors helped Anika with a rather unique problem earlier this week. She comes in from work saying, “I have an animal in my ear!”

Hallie, Molly, and I look at each other, bewildered.

“I can feel it moving around! Like deep in my ear, by my brain!”

Um…OK…

But eventually we figured out that she wasn’t having an episode, but rather meant that her ear contained an insect or spider of some sort. And upon going in and explaining to the doctor, they had it out in 5 minutes. ANOTHER TRIUMPH OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

Anyhow, that is most of what I have to say for the day. Parental and family figures, don’t worry…the throat problem is nearly over. Mostly. We’ll see. Down on the dirty, germy ol’ farm, things seem to take 3 times as long to heal. Molly and I are discovering this with our numerous farm cuts and contusions. Yeah, we’re like twice as tough as we used to be. We also have these huge deltoids. With barbed wire tattoos. And we chew tobacco. And spit and cuss.

Also, on a “pop-culture-starved” note, Hallie’s mom sent her an Entertainment Weekly last week. Molly’s mom sent a People Magazine this week. Do they lack substance and importance? They do. Did we pounce upon them and devour every last page, including Entertainment Weekly’s ENTIRE, SIXTY-PAGE “Sex and the City” overkill love-fest? We did. Do I even like “Sex and the City”? Errrrrrrgh.

Oh. And Sofia and Yanni made up an obscene gesture this week that appears to be for use ONLY AT ME. Like Molly said — EVIL CHILDREN.

So, yes. Short post, since it has only been a short while since my last post. Anyone expecting e-mails from me-slash-us, we might not have internet access (i.e., we might not come into the big city) for at least a week after today. Just FYI.

One week until Italy travel begins! I am SO EXCITED!

 

Our Farm in Argalasti, Greece

Hi everybody! We are in Volos on our weekly email trip and I will take a few minutes here to tell you all about our first wwooffing location.

Our farm is located on the Pelion Penisula, about a day’s journey from Athens by train. The peninsula is a sleepy little 30 mile stretch of rocky hills, olive trees, and white washed villages which seem to have way more buildings than appropriate for the number of people you see in them. People here farm and fish (and cater to long term tourists) for a living and seem to enjoy the quiet life Our hosts, for example, claim they haven’t been to Athens in 10 years and the last movie they saw in the theater was The Horse Whisperer.

We are about halfway through our stretch here at our Greek farm and we have settled into a routine of work sleep work that makes the time go pretty fast. We do thing like make horse fences the size of football fields in pastures with grass as high as your ears or shovels horse manure for the garden or haul hay. Let me just say here that hay is HEAVY. Its like lead. And it bites, like every other plant in Greece. A lot of time is spent in the garden, which is such a historic mess that it takes an hour of heavy industrial weeding to make a square foot patch of usable dirt. Its kind of like attempting to rip out all the grass from my backyard in Buffalo Center but keep the dandelions. But the garden improves quickly with the four of us (Dani, Molly, Halli – other woofer, whom we love, and Anika) working on it so hard. So far work isn’t that bad, although it is actually pretty hard some days. Im happy Im learning all this wierd new stuff, like how it feels to be stung by an electric fence and how to clean a fish.

A lot of time is spent preparing, eating and cleaning up after lunch. Anika is a phenomenal cook and makes things like stuffed peppers, mashed potatoes, vegetable stew, cheese tortellini, etc. every day. Even better, she is a closet vegetarian and says she doesnt mind at all that Hallie and I are veggies. I eat myself silly every day and then need a nap to recover.

When we are not working or sleeping, we come in contact with the majority of animals on the farm, which include dogs, kittens, and children aged 3 to 9. The dogs do nothing but sun themselves, and the kittens are impossibly adorable. The cutest one I have named Peanut and have basically claimed her for life. Another we named Tula after My Big Fat Greek Wedding and another is named Danger because it seems to be the children’s favorite. The two older kids, for whatever reason, seem to have a mean streak that encourages them to abuse anything small and cute (like kittens). And their younger sister, unfortunately, is both small and cute. SO often around here we have the evil laughter of Sophie and Yani and then an afternoon of wailing from little Katerina, the three year old that speaks two more languages than me.

For future reference, to clean a fish, first break the head off and then rip it open, using an upward motion of the thumb to clean out the guts.

Love,
Molly